In the beginning of the podcast, we talk for a moment about an author we both really like. He has nothing (overtly) to do with The Prodigal Son, but he has everything to do with Returning to the Self in that he writes the human experience so fully and deeply. Pick up anything by Fredrik Backman, and I dare you not to cry. More specifically, Beartown and its sequel Us Against Them are two of my favorites. (I also recommend My Grandmother Said to Tell You She’s Sorry. It is so tender.)

I tend to put myself in any story I read, and I especially love the ones about which I am sad when they are over. The question to ponder this week, and the weeks to come, is who am I — who are you — in the story of the prodigal son? The parables are designed to illustrate what the realm of God is like, and the moral ultimately is that it includes all - the young son, the elder son, the father who is also symbolic of the mother, and all of those not in the story, too. I think Jesus uses so many parables to make this point over and over and over again.

When we encounter the parables, I believe our job is to continue and expand them. Rembrandt does just that in his painting of the Prodigal Son as does poet Allison Funk in her poem “The Prodigal’s Mother Speaks to God.”

When he returned a second time,
the straps of his sandals broken,
his robe stained with wine,
it was not as easy to forgive.
By then his father
was long gone himself,
leaving me with my other son, the sullen one
whose anger is the instrument he tunes
from good morning on.
I know.
There’s no room for a man
in the womb.
But when I saw my youngest coming from far off,
so small he seemed, a kid
unsteady on its legs.
She-goat
what will you do? I thought,
remembering when he learned to walk.
Shape shifter! It’s like looking through water—
the heat bends, it blurs everything: brush, precipice.
A shambles between us.

The Prodigal Son is an invitation to enter into pain and healing, into that which we can see and not see, into a journey of finding and being found. Each individual life is symbolized by stories like the Prodigal Son as are multi-generational family dynamics. In most families I know, there is much to repair and much opportunity to return to compassion, to visit the “shambles between us.” Sometimes it takes generations to heal such pain, and that’s okay too. The journey of arriving at the True Self is solitary and influenced by everyone we have ever encountered. If we do not leave “home,” we have no opportunity to return, and the return is how we heal. Thanks for listening and “see” you in some form or another very soon!